Is there a canon in this class?

ABSTRACT

The article addresses issues of interpretation and selection as they are dealt with in current debates on the nature, the content, and the effects of processes and mechanisms of canonization in sociology. It makes a case for a more empirically grounded and sociologically sensitive approach to these issues, drawing from recent research programmes in digital humanities (e.g. distant reading) and insisting on the benefits of cumulative case histories of individual scholars with their patterns of social relations in different countries and languages. The case of gender inclusion/exclusion is focused upon as both exemplary and symptomatic. Finally, the article introduces to the following five articles, presenting briefly their contents and ratio.

KEYWORDS:

• Sociology
• canon
• authors
• classics
• exclusion/inclusion
• gender
• nationality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 On DuBois there is now a huge literature, see Morris (2015) for a recent contribution; on Ibn Khaldun see Alatas (2014) and Alatas and Sinha (2017).

2 See on Mead and his place in the canon Jacobs (2009), Huebner (2014), Shalin (2015).

3 But it has not gone unnoticed that there is some deep religious grounding in American sociology, as shown historically by Vidich and Lyman (1985), Henking (1992) and Greek (1992), and with reference to the contemporary scene by Evans and Evans (2012), and Smith (2014), the latter being a sociologist and social theorist with a stated Catholic orientation – which has not prevented him, to be sure, from becoming a respected sociologist (of religion) in the US sociological field.

4 For this purpose, we carried out a little investigation on Web of Science (WoS), taking into account ten of the most-mentioned female social scientists/sociologists in anthologies edited by feminist theorists, who were active from the mid-19th century to WWII: Jane Addams, Harriet Martineau, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Beatrice Webb, Marianne Weber, Marion Talbot, Annie Marion Maclean, Edith Abbott, Grace Abbott and Sophonisba Breckinridge. Thus since 1970, only Addams (9 times), Marianne Weber (twice), and E. Abbott (once) are quoted in scholarly textbooks covered in WoS. For what concerns Addams, however, only one of the handbooks where she is mentioned may be defined as sociological (Handbook of Sociology and Human Rights 2013), whereas the other ones range from social work to moral pragmatism up to the educational field. Furthermore, in only two cases is she mentioned as a sociologist, with reference to her ‘sociology of love’. Marianne Weber is, in both cases, quoted in a sociological handbook/textbook, even when they are far from being considered ‘canonical’ for the discipline. Above all, both the references concern their relationship with her husband Max Weber. Finally, E. Abbott is mentioned in a Handbook of Communication for one of her articles published in the AJS.

5 Meuter was a pupil of Leopold von, one of the main actors pushing for the institutionalization of sociology during the Weimar Republic and the second chairholder of sociology in Germany in 1921 at the University of Cologne (cf. Grüning, 2021).

6 A similar paradigmatic example is represented by female intellectuals close to the school of social science in Chicago (cf. Lengermann & Niebrugge, 1998).

7 It is also important to consider how, for instance, issues of race and religion overlapped for Jews during the Nazi regime.

8 To give some clarification: Arendt (1906–1975) is often associated with both Heidegger (even though often not for intellectual affinities) and Karl Jaspers, who were her mentors during her study of philosophy. Charlotte Bühler (1893–1974) was the wife of Karl Bühler. Nevertheless, after getting her teaching qualification in psychology in 1923, she was a visiting scholar at the Rockefeller Institute (1924–1925) and at Columbia University in 1930; a year later she became a full professor, that is, she was able to build or maintain academic relationships thanks to her scientific prestige. Viola Klein (1908–1973) emigrated to England in 1938 without prior specific academic experiences. In London, she met Karl Mannheim, who became her supervisor. Charlotte Lütkens (1896–1967) was a pupil of Alfred Weber and Emil Lederer. From 1923 to 1927, she worked as foreign correspondent for a newspaper. In 1937 she emigrated to London where she became Karl Mannheim’s assistant . Detailed information on Marie Jahoda and Herta Herzog can be found in Christian Fleck’s article in this special issue.

9 Feminist theorists who studied the works and biographies of the women of the Chicago School particularly stressed that the earlier generation introduced an innovative ‘research method’ which they defined as ‘feminist pragmatism’. According to them, both social theory and new ways of carrying out empirical critical ethnography merged in social praxis and had policy implications (cf. McDonald, 1998). Similar observations may be made for the women (and men) participating in the Fabian society in England, including Beatrice Potter Webb (cf. Scott & Bromley, 2013), as well as for the women who participated to the first generation of the women’s movement (Frauenbewegung) in Germany (cf. Schüler, 2004), and the French social scientists close to the Leplay groups and the Musée social (cf. Charron, 2011). As stressed by Grant et al. (2002), this distinctive character depends, however, on the structural position women occupied, for which it would also be misleading to generalize this ‘pragmatic’ way of doing social research to all female sociologists of the time, without considering their ‘place’ in the sociological/social science field.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Barbara Grüning

Barbara Grüning is a senior researcher in cultural sociology at the University of Milan – Bicocca. Her research interests range from the sociology of space to the sociology of the body, the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of memory, the history of the social sciences, the sociology of academic labour, and comics studies. She has widely published in international journals and in edited books in English, German, and Italian. She is the author of three books (in Italian) on the politics of memory and urban space. With Marco Santoro she has contributed to the Oxford Handbook on Pierre Bourdieu (2018) and edited the Italian translation of Emilie Altenloh’s Toward a sociology of the cinema (1914).

Marco Santoro

Marco Santoro is professor of sociology at the Department of the Arts, University of Bologna. He currently works on intellectual life, arts, cultural production, the history of social and cultural theory, and mafia studies. He has contributed chapters to various handbooks and readers in cultural and music sociology. He has co-edited the Companion to Everett Hughes (Anthem Press 2016), Ideas on the move in the social sciences and humanities (Palgrave 2020) and is currently coediting the Anthem Companion to Antonio Gramsci. His book Mafia Politics is forthcoming for Polity (2021).